‘Life of Pi’ Co-Star Irrfan Khan Has Finally Read the Book

Irrfan Khan poses during a promotional event for the film Life of Pi in Mumbai on October 29, 2012.

“Cloud Atlas,” “Skyfall” and now “Life of Pi” – there’s a spate of book-based films in cinemas, leading to the perennial question: Read the book and then watch the movie or vice versa? The pitfalls of each decision are obvious – take too long with the book and the movie will be gone from theaters. See the film first and risk becoming bored with the book.

Irrfan Khan, who plays the adult version of Piscine Patel in “Life of Pi,” assures audiences that there’s no right or wrong way to approach the dilemma. “If they’ve read the book, the experience will be much greater,” he says. “If they haven’t read the book, the film will take care of the experience.”

As for Khan, long before he found out Yann Martel’s novel “Life of Pi” was going to be made into a movie, he wanted to read the book that follows the story of Pi, a teenage boy who becomes stranded at sea on a lifeboat with a vicious tiger. He never got around to it.

Then when the 45-year-old Bollywood actor was up for the role of the grown Pi, Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee told him he no longer had a choice. “Even then I didn’t read the book,” recalls Khan. “In the next meeting he asked me, ‘Did you read the book?’”

The answer was still no. Khan, who has starred in Hollywood hits like “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “A Mighty Heart,” told Lee that he would only delve into it when the director confirmed he had landed the part of Pi. “I never wanted to invest emotionally,” explains Khan. “I just read the script first, because Ang sent it to me.”

When Lee cast Khan, he finally put aside the script and picked up the book. Khan says he found that he was able to explore and grope the deeper themes of the story that the film couldn’t cover visually, rendering it an entirely different experience. “There are so many issues which are so explicit in the book,” he explains of ideas like the belief that “people or animals or any being seem much more comfortable and secure in confinement.”

And while the book contains some very gut-wrenching and savage passages, Khan realized conversely, “the film has touched those things in a very poetic way.”

When asked if Lee’s movie does Martel’s story justice, Khan is certain that each version is powerful enough to stand on its own. “Yann Martel said somewhere that these two things have the same name but they’re from different authors,” he says. “You’ll never feel a need to compare them and that’s something very hard to achieve. Each should have its own soul because they’re in different mediums.”

So film then book, book followed by film, just one or even none of the above? Choose your own adventure, recommends Khan.